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Concentrated Risk, the Coventry Blitz, Chamberlain’s Cancer

Concentrated Risk, the Coventry Blitz, Chamberlain’s Cancer

Nir Eyal

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190217471.003.0007

Suppose that Churchill had known in advance about the German Blitz plan for Coventry and decided to do nothing against it, in order to cut overall British war casualties by a little. Would that decision be wrong? Norman Daniels has recently argued that, other things being equal, abandoning individuals or groups to what he calls “concentrated risk”—higher risk than others face—is wrong. Any such decision is unfair toward those who face concentrated risk. A Danielsian might claim that fairness toward the inhabitants of Coventry would have made it wrong to abandon them to unfairly concentrated risk of death. This chapter argues against treating risk Daniels’s way—as a currency of distributive justice. As it shows, applying fairness considerations to risk distribution founders on either epistemic or nonepistemic interpretations of risk.

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 13 December 2017